Towards a systems approach to sustainable development

Abstract

“Sustainable development” as a concept was popularised by a 1987 report of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development. The report defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. However, from this definition, we cannot ascertain the central intuition of the notion of sustainable development. Failure to do this makes it difficult to derive methods that can be used to formulate effective intervention policies that can enable nations to attain sustainable development. This paper briefly reviews various schools of thought in popular literature on the notion of sustainable development, exposes their weaknesses and develops a holistic notion of sustainable development based on the systems approach.